In case you were wondering, I am not dead. Though there have been times earlier last week I wished so.

You see, right after I published the Carnival of the Godless, I fell ill with Infectious Mononucleosis. I had one of the worst sore throats in my life. Talking and swallowing were both incredibly painful. I spent most of last week in bed.

Even though slavery is over in most parts of the world, there are still millions still wearing slave chains around the world, even in Western Civilization. They are just chains of a different kind of slavery, not political, but religious. And they give rise to social controversy.

Orson Scott Card, relatively well-known science fiction / fantasy writer, has written an article lambasting us “Darwinists” for using bad arguments against the poor, defenseless IDiots. The bulk of it is surprising incomprehensible, especially considering his relatively crisp work as an SF author. But it becomes clear very early on that he hasn’t done his research. I’d like to deal with his two most egregious mistakes, and then take a quick review of the entire piece of dreck he calls an article.

I have learned recently that in the Defense bill that recently passed Congress, there were provisions to require state and local governments to get federal funds to support the Boy Scouts.
For any who do not understand the objections being made against the Boy Scouts, I offer the following story. This may be considered a sequel to “A Perspective on the Pledge” that I posted a couple of weeks ago.

Jesus and I both thought that we were the Messiah. Nobody believed me and nobody should believe Jesus either. My eight months of experience as “psychotic Jesus” gives me a perspective on analyzing the words that he supposedly spoke and relating them to symptoms of manic-depression. Once you agree that he must have been psychotic, then he must be considered a supreme tyrant as well. Excercising absolute power cruely and unjustly is actually an understatement considering his threats of eternal hellfire (absolute power exercised very cruely and very unjustly). Bam! He’s Not Your Savior. He’s Your Psychotic Tyrant.

Why do we want to leap in and denounce theist diatribes. Why should we cut in between a group of theists and confront them with our rational, atheistic logic? Many times we are confronted with a plaintive “Why can’t we agree to disagree and respect each others points of view?” I will try to explain my own personal stance here.

Are you uncertain about the existence of God? Do you doubt the existence of God? Most people would probably regard the two states as being identical, or at least identical in all of the essentials, but that would be inaccurate. Uncertainty and doubt are surely related, but if we look closely at them we find that they are quite different in the underlying attitudes.

The facts surrounding disbelief were available to all for centuries. The Ancient Greeks knew the Problem of Evil. Thomas Paine wrote about the errors of the Bible. The contradictions inherent in the divine nature given to us by the Church have been pointed out for a long time by atheologians. Neo-Darwinism and Big Bang Theory have blown the beliefs about Creation wide open. While the mythicist case against “Jesus” has recently exploded, it is not new.

If you submitted something but don’t see it here, it may because I overlooked it, but probably because I felt it wasn’t written from a godless perspective. The next Carnival of the Godless will be held over at Goosing the Antithesis on February 19th.

On CSI last night, it showed the killer googling ‘clayton nash‘. Of course the results were different on the show than in real life, but this is still another interesting episode in the whole CSI/Google product placement saga.